SOUFIANE ABABRI
Si nous ne brûlons pas,
comment éclairer la nuit ?
Paris
4 May - 10 June 2023
EXHIBITED WORKS
PREVIEW
PRESS RELEASE
CV
BOOKLET
Bed work / (The story didn’t stop at Jack’s hotel), 2023
"If I don’t burn
if you don’t burn
if we don’t burn
how will the light
vanquish the darkness?
These words taken from a poem written by Nâzım Hikmet in 1930 have been reinterpreted by Soufiane Ababri for the title of his new exhibition. The Turkish poet was imprisoned several times because of his political activities and was obliged to live in hiding and in exile, before being stripped of his nationality, which would only be restored after his death. In “Kerem Gibi”, the poem from which these lines are taken, Hikmet takes a traditional 16th century folk tale telling the story of a forbidden love and transforms it into a call for revolutionary action. Ababri revisits the subversive nature of eroticism, bringing together various works that address, each in their own way, the theme of a fall from grace.
At the origin of the project are two long, horizontal drawings on remnants of paper from the large rolls that Ababri uses for his drawings, pieces that he put aside for a long time because of their atypical format. In one of them, a naked figure is being dragged along the ground as if the victim of physical punishment, unless he is trying to prevent a man who has lost interest in him from leaving. In the other, a man who has obviously stayed too long in the sun flops drunkenly on a table. These scenes of humiliation and woe feature characters who have fallen from grace; not only do they evoke the nature of the paper on which they have been brought to life – scrap paper – but also the characters’ marginal status. Starting from this observation, Ababri sets out to study the notion of the fall.
Whether the fall is physical, moral or social, falling is a recurrent theme in Western art. In the mid 16th century for example, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted several works on the subject that have since become famous, such as the fall of Icarus or of the rebel angels, however the most exemplary painting is The Blind Leading the Blind (1568). Using a diagonal composition, it portrays six characters (who embody spiritual blindness) falling in progression, the last collapsing to the ground. More recently, the existentialist filmed performances of Bas Jan Ader – falling from the roof of a house, into a canal in Amsterdam or from the branch of a tree – evoke a quest for the absolute and a desire to sacrifice everything for the moment.
The figure of Jean Genet – considered emblematic by Ababri – exemplifies such a romantic conception of the fall. In one of the works on show, Ababri references Genet by means of a collage of various images on the wall of a cell where a prisoner is lying on his bed. The scene is reminiscent of the first paragraphs of Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) in which Genet describes the photos of the men he fantasises about that he has taped to the walls of his cell. In the collage, Ababri uses pages that have fallen out of an old biography of the French writer. The images include a portrait of a young Genet with an aerial view of one of the prisons in which he was incarcerated. In another photo he is older and seems to be looking at the tightrope walker Abdallah Bentaga, his partner for several years who committed suicide at the age of 28. On another photo, we can see Ababri himself sitting on Genet’s grave, which is in Morocco not far from where the artist grew up. Like the characters in his books, Genet always refused to fit in the mould. Abandoned as a child and then adopted, he often ran away from home preferring to live on the run. His life was one of constant reinvention, however for Genet reinventing himself was not synonymous with sublimation or social mobility. Throughout his life Genet fought against the diktats of success, bearing witness on the contrary to the temptations of evil and a life considered by some to be seedy and disreputable.
Another non-conformist literary figure present in the exhibition is Oscar Wilde, who is lying in a Christ-like pose in the middle of a large drawing surrounded by young Algerians. Once again, this is not an illustration but rather a reinterpretation of Wilde’s biography that was inspired by André Gide’s account of how Wilde took him to Algeria and introduced him to what is known today as sex tourism. Wilde indisputably personifies the fallen man. At the height of his success, he was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for being a homosexual and all his property was seized. In Ababri’s portrait, the young men encircling Wilde as golden coins rain down are far from being loyal followers kneeling before him with tears in their eyes. They seem instead to be joyous. Rather than being subjected to sexual colonialism, they revel in the freedom of their bodies and desires. Ababri belies the clichés associated with homoeroticism and the Orient, not so much to do away with them entirely, but rather to complexify them. The same goes for the ensemble of drawings on pink paper that draw inspiration from the Turkish film Hammam (Ferzan Özpetek, 1997). Throughout the illustrated sequence, the main character is separated from reality by a sort of fog (as in the steam bath), a device which keeps the homoerotic relations portrayed therein at a distance as if to reappraise them.
This challenging of preconceived ideas continues in Ababri’s preference for cheap everyday materials purchased in supermarkets and the like rather than artist materials. Eschewing academic hierarchy, his approach aims to be more egalitarian. In the same vein, when designing each exhibition, he paints the walls in colours with a more homely feel to get away from the image of the sacrosanct white cube. In this exhibition he has opted for purple, a colour often associated with the gay community. The colour is the exact same shade as seen in Suicide (Purple Jumping Man), a 1963 silkscreen print by Andy Warhol based on a press photo of a man jumping out of a window. This tragic scene has completely disappeared and only the mauve colour remains in the form of speech bubbles signifying a fall or a disappearance.
Warhol is one of these “faggots” of whom Ababri has produced numerous portraits and which are assembled under the title Yes I am. In this series Ababri has been portraying the queer community for several years, bearing witness both to the kinship between and the unique nature of its members. In this exhibition, the series only appears in residual form with reference images recycled to create a spiral composition. In addition to Warhol, this work includes James Baldwin, Tom Ford and Jimmy Sommerville, as well as John Waters and his muse Divine, who was so called by the Baltimore-born filmmaker in a tribute to the drag queen in the aforementioned novel by Jean Genet. Just like the art of drag of which Divine is an icon, voguing is an art form that exaggerates everyday attitudes. From the 70s on, this dance style became a new form of expression and means of recognition for people marginalised because of their gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnic origins or social class. Voguing has since been a tool of empowerment. One of the basic movements in voguing is the “dip”: a theatricalised fall in which the performer flamboyantly collapses on the ground in a move that turns the action of falling into a sublime and quintessential physical performance.
Soufiane Ababri describes his creations as “bedworks”, because they are drawn while the artist is lying on his bed. The importance of this inverted perspective - a posture that contradicts the myth of the virile artist painting in his studio in a standing position - has already been analysed. Here our attention is drawn to the word “embedded” written on one of the exhibited drawings. A text written to either side of an erect penis reads: “Something between fear and desire has become embedded in me since I tasted the depth of your night”. Night, which evokes the darkness in Nâzım Hikmet’s poem, is a time when anything goes, a moment that gives rise to different connections with oneself and others in which fear and desire prevail. Once revealed, these contradictory feelings appear “embedded” and therefore inalienable. In exploring the fall, Ababri reminds us of the importance of taking risks and possibly falling, like the tightrope artist walking on the rope, to come into being in the world and to oneself.
Devrim Bayar
Photos : © Rebecca Fanuele
